Twisted Spinster

Today’s my birthday! Er, hooray?

Huh. Just a few minutes ago this big gray squirrel climbed up on the screen to my patio and clung on to it for a while, and he had the most enormous furry schlong. Well, you know, for his size. I mean, if it had been a male human being the schlong would go down to the man’s knees. Even my cat was intimidated.

Update: preliminary Casanova review. Okay, here’s a memory from my childhood. I think I’m in high school, and I’m, I don’t know, in my room doing whatever — listening to Jimi Hendrix on the radio or something (I was in high school in the disco era but I managed to avoid that in my bedroom). Anyway, I go out to get some more Coke or Doritos or something, and my mother is watching teevee, and she says “My gosh, you should have seen this — they just had this woman having sex with all these men right there on tv in front of God and everybody.” The show she was watching was the I, Claudius episode where Messalina makes a bet with the whore that she can sleep with more men, and then has sex with, I think, 74 men in one night. She won. Let’s just say that Masterpiece Theater has always been a reliable source of prime time sex scenes since the 70s, and you could even get the occasional flash of ass, all before cable was even a dream. Now if you’ll excuse me.

Update, and ending thoughts: actually, it surprised me, though not really — like all of these “ain’t rampant sex and fun fun fun grand” epics it ends on a sad, chastened note, with a not very convincing declaration by the young amanuensis that, inspired by Casanova’s wild, useless life, she’ll “strike out on her own.” Yeah I guess the filmmakers have to say that, but the obvious lesson one gets from Casanova is that the wild life is no life to live.

As for the production itself, it was “hey it’s that guy” for anyone who watches current British tv. (For example, Casanova’s servant/best buddy was played by the same actor who played Martha Jones’ dad correction: the Captain in the “Impossible Planet/Satan Pit” episodes in Doctor Who.) The performances were all good — these are British actors after all. I’d like to know what they did to turn David Tennant’s normally brown irises blue to match Peter O’Toole’s — probably some film treatment thing. The costumes were anachronistically avant garde, especially in the hallucinogenic Naples scenes, but the series was obviously not dedicated to stringent historic verisimilitude. Russell T. Davies was the executive producer, so there was a gay-ish atmosphere all over everything, but they chickened out with the castrato love interest who turned out to be a real girl. I was rooting for a real boy, myself. I guess he used all that daring stuff up on Queer As Folk.

There are tropical carnivorous bees. I may never leave the house again.

(Via, further via.)

There I was, lying peacefully in my bed, trying to ignore the cat (this would be the old one) who was sitting next to me and staring at me. After a few moments she got tired of staring, and started putting her cold nose on my arm.

I moved my arm under the covers.

But then I got sort of hot, so I moved my arm back out into the open, and soon was getting the cold nose treatment. “Oh go lie down, I’ll get up in a few minutes,” I said to the cat.

Cats can understand English. They just do what they want to do no matter what you are saying.

Anyway, I said this, and gave her a little pat on the head.

CHOMP!

She bit my arm, the bitch. After tossing the cat off the bed, I tried to go back to sleep, but sleep was impossible by that time. Besides, I really shouldn’t lie around in bed all day — this week is pretty much of a write-off, but I didn’t want to get into the habit of sleeping all morning. And the cat obviously needed her pill (and both of them needed feeding), so up I got.

The weather was good — cloudy and drizzly. We really need rain here. Also the clouds cool things off just a little bit, though now that it’s summer the humidity offsets most of the cooling. I decided to clean out the fridge, the litter box, etc. (That BBC show How Clean Is Your House really has had an effect on me.) Then I got ready to leave the house. I got all dressed up, more or less — the older and plainer I get the more care I take with my appearance, though I haven’t gotten to the point where I put on makeup. It sits in a box, waiting for that day. Anyway, off I went to Target. Well, off I went to the car, intending to get into it and drive to Target.

Splat!

Some idiot had left a hunk of what looked like a ham or beef bone in the parking lot. My heel had come right down on it and turned, and I fell on my knee and then just kept going. That’s the second time in two months I’ve fallen down on the pavement. This time I didn’t scrape myself up badly, but my hand, my foot, my knee, my hip, my shoulder, all are sore, and I got motor oil all over my nice clean jeans from a stain in the parking lot I fell in. I limped indoors, changed my pants, took two Advil and one tablespoon of mead because that’s all the booze I have in the house (mead isn’t very strong, I need to get some brandy), and an hour or so later did end up going to Target because there were things I needed, but the bloom of the day was gone. So I’m probably going to sit and finish off the mead and watch Casanova which just came in the mail today and in general veg out. Either way, I’m not going out again.

Well, at least they want to see David Tennant, who is currently playing the part, with not so many clothes. I have proof. A while back I decided to try out Blockbuster Video’s Netflix-like online rental thing. Unlike Netflix, they had the Masterpiece Theater production of Casanova that starred David Tennant in and out of all sorts of costumes. Naturally I put that in my queue right away, but the wait time was something like six years (or whatever “Very Long Wait” really means — probably “the last middle-aged cat lady with the not-so-secret crush on D.T. who ordered it has ‘lost’ the only copy we had”), and it never did become available, and as Blockbuster didn’t have any other movies that I wanted to see that weren’t available via Netflix I quit my Blockbuster membership and used the savings to order a copy from Amazon. This was just before I lost my job, but it was only twenty bucks. As I am extra cheap I chose the least expensive shipping option so I won’t get it until next week so my review of Mr. Tennant in (and not in) pretty 18th century clothes macking with all sorts of people will have to wait.

Then I saw that Netflix was getting some BBC Mystery thing he’d been in which according to the reviews on the internets was pretty steamy. (Well here are quotes, what do you think? Put that fantasy about Rose Tyler out of your head right now, people! That’s just so wrong.) Of course I put it in my queue. It wasn’t going to be released until yesterday. I forgot to check Netflix yesterday. I checked it today, and what do I see in the availability column? “Very long wait.”

People know what they want.

Next day update: heh, guess what I got in the mail. Occasionally Amazon surprises me by sending stuff sooner than they say they would. I may not be online much tonight…

Kathy wonders why

“women” who are “trapped” in all these men’s bodies are always so butt ugly when they’re finally “set free”?

My favorite part of the article, though, is the paragraph that carefully points out that

Emma, aged 42, has a birth certificate and a “gender recognition certificate” to prove her legal status as a woman although she is still waiting for final surgery to make her transition from male to female physically complete.

It’s not so easy to take that final, irrevocable step, is it. Oh and of course, as always seems to be the way, “Emma” used to be “a married dad of two called Andrew.” This whole story is supposed to make us feel sorry for Andy/Emma, but in my case it just isn’t working properly, despite the fact that our tranny’s opponent is one of those extra-touchy members of the “Religion of Peace.” I’m with Kathy — can’t they both lose?

Here it is:

latte-chuggin’ tree-huggin’ electric-car-pluggin’ Jesus-muggin’ speech-code-thuggin’ effete perverted condescending Eastern liberal establishment faux intellectual Pansy Class

If I had any embroidery talent I’d make a sampler of that to hang on my wall.

Lynn has more thoughts on my criticism of Doctor Who, and I comment.

Tim updates us on his new site’s new moderators. It does look like the new site is picking up steam. Now if only they would do something about the load time — I have a fast cable internet connection, and it takes a while. People on dialup must be in agony.

I’ve been trying to eat only food I prepare myself, or at least have to take out of a sealed freezer box and heat in the stove. Just about every time I eat out these days I find myself ending up with something wrong with my gut. In fact, for almost the last two weeks I’ve been fighting off some sort of “stomach flu” which probably came from some inadequately-handwashing fast food employee. At least I don’t live in Canada, where I would be expected to share the diseases of my fellow human beings because it’s apparently, to the disturbed Canadian bureaucrat mind, racist to expect minorities to adhere to Western standards of cleanliness.

Rachel says FOAD. Ah, I remember when I used to rant like that (nostalgic sigh…)

Just a brief entry to thank everyone who has donated to my Unemployed Again bleg. The money really is helping!

One more note: we’re finally getting some rain here in Central Florida. Yesterday there was a cloudburst, which seemed to vanish before it hit the ground — today a bit more.